Letter: Disagrees with Charley Reese's column on Palestinians

Seymour ChalfinSt. Augustine

Published Sunday, May 13, 2001

In his angry column of May 2, Charley Reese takes off once again after his favorite whipping boy: Israel. Given Reese's usual attitudes, his strong sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians is quite extraordinary. This is the man who continually glorifies the Confederacy, which existed on the backs of slave labor.

In the nine years since I've made the acquaintance of his columns, I don't recall him writing a single word in support of the civil rights struggle in the United States. The slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda and the massacre of East Timorese by the Indonesian Army passed without comment by Reese. He opposed U.S. intervention in Bosnia to stop the violence there, but consistency not being one of Reese's strong points, he appeals to the U.S. government to intercede on behalf of the Palestinians.

Reese writes with apparently total ignorance about the century-old history of Zionism, about the two millennia of Jewish persecution that produced it and about the fact that the Holocaust was the final event that precipitated the creation of the Jewish state. Without the Holocaust, there would be no Israel. If Reese was the least bit fair, he would recognize the near-miracle of Israel's existence. This is a nation which came into being through the efforts of a small remnant of European Jewry, that has absorbed about 4 million immigrants in 50 years, which has fought four wars against great odds to keep from being extinguished, and more recently has developed a prosperous and vibrant economy. It is the only democracy in the Middle East, and instead of outrageously comparing the Israel Defense Force to the Nazi army during World War II, he should compare Israel to the likes of Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The problem of the Palestinians is complex. It will be settled sooner or later, but only on terms that guarantee Israel's security. What other sovereign state would accept less. Let us also remember that in the history of warfare, there is only one nation that has voluntarily yielded conquered territory.

Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt and is still negotiating to give the Palestinians a large bloc of land conquered by Israel in bloody fighting so they can have their own state. That they don't have it yet is their own fault. Former Premier Ehud Barak offered Arafat everything the Palestinians had been demanding, and he turned down the deal. Presumably he's still dreaming of driving the Israelis into the Mediterranean. If and when the Palestinians get their state, I don't expect much. In the course of its short history, the Palestinian Authority had presented the picture of a government that is dictatorial and corrupt to its core.

Finally, a word about Charley Reese. There's only one reason why he's so charged up about the Palestinians. It's because they're located in Israel, and it gives Reese an opportunity to flog the Jews. Reese is a bigot and a very large part of his bigotry consists of anti-Semitism.